Last year on the morning before Christmas, just as much of the country was preparing food for a holiday dinner that night or prepping for the next day as they welcomed family and guests to stay for the holiday weekend, Duke Energy in the Carolinas issued a jarring announcement to their hundreds of thousands of customers that they would begin imposing rolling power outages immediately.
The outages were desperately needed because of the strain on the electric grid caused by the extreme weather that had crippled much of the country in the previous days. By noon, 340,000 Duke Energy customers were without power, and by Christmas morning, that number hit 500,000 at one point, with most of the outages lasting anywhere from a half-hour to several hours as the temperatures dipped into the low teens both days.
It could have been worse.
Two weeks ago, the North American Electric Reliability…
